Henry Miles
Orem UT

Just as “there’s no glory in the war once you’ve seen its awful cost,” the glory of gangster gun battles fades quickly when one reads a post like this and ponders the immense personal cost the family has paid.

p.s. i appreciate the work that went into formatting the hyperlinks to get me up-to-speed on the background.

For several months before Dad was assigned to take over the Dillinger gang with a special squad of agents separate from the Chicago Field Office agents, Purvis had a series of dramatic failures, including the great debacle of Little Bohemia. Public pressure was at the boiling point; a petition was being circulated to get rid of Purvis, who had been a long time favorite of Hoover. They had a very close personal relationship, some compared it to a father – son relationship. But now Purvis was seen as an incompetent gloryhound and was forced out of the FBI a few months after Dad died. He desperately needed to redeem his reputation, and with Dad’s disinclination for publicity and to deal with the press himself, Purvis took the opportunity to take credit.

As an aside, while I was going to law school in Washington DC (1959-1962) I worked in the office of Senator Wallace F. Bennett. One of my friends was an elevator operator in the NSOB, the building where I worked. One afternoon he said to me with reference to an elderly man leaving the elevator, “That’s the famous FBI man that got Dillinger.” Purvis had been given a job with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, housed in my building. So, I was close enough to touch him on that day. It was not too long after that when I read in the newspaper that Purvis had committed suicide.